The Future of Content Management and Our Investment in Storyblok
Fatou Bintou Sagnang and I have been spending time in the headless CMS space over the past few months, which ultimately led to our investment in Storyblok — the next generation headless CMS serving both developers and non-developers alike. You can read our thinking on the market and Storyblok below.
Bill Gates may have coined the phrase “Content is King” back in 1996, but if the last decade is anything to go by, the sentiment still holds true. Today, there are 2 billion websites on the world wide web, compared to 1 billion in 2014. But the web is just the tip of the iceberg — the ubiquity of mobile content and the rise of connected devices means that businesses have to shift away from the web-only world and start delivering omni-channel, flexible digital experiences to their customers.
Managing the content deluge
Enterprise spending on content management is forecast to grow to $120bn by 2025
CMSs have been around since the dawn of the internet, with enterprises spending ~$60bn on content management globally. This figure is forecast to grow to nearly $120bn by 2025. Traditional players e.g. WordPress, Joomla or Drupal dominate nearly 40% of the market, with WordPress itself powering over 30% of all websites. However, this type of CMS has not been designed with the complexities of modern content management in mind. They are known as monolithic or “coupled” CMSs as the front end and the back end are tied closely together: the back end holds the content, while the front end dictates the presentation layer and mode of delivery. This coupled architecture means that text, images, HTML and CSS are combined within one bucket, and so content cannot be reused as it is mixed with code. A traditional CMS also tends to enforce a specific webpage-oriented framework for the front end, making it difficult for content to be delivered across different digital channels.
Welcome the new wave: headless CMS
Headless CMS is the new wave of CMS which promises a significantly higher degree of flexibility. It consists of a back-end-only content repository and an API, while the presentation layer (i.e. the “head”) is decoupled and completely independent from the CMS. With this headless approach, content can be streamed via the API not only to a single website, but also to any other platform e.g. an app, digital display, wearable device, etc.
Aside from serving as a centralized hub for all content and thus simplifying its management, headless CMS brings many other benefits:
- Separating content from the presentation layer means that editors can be updating content in parallel with developers making changes to the front end. This results in significant efficiency gains: rolling out a new site with a legacy CMS might take weeks to months, while with headless it can take as little as a few days.
- With the front end being decoupled, developers have the freedom to use their front-end framework of choice, allowing them to always go with the latest and most appropriate technology depending on the delivery channel.
- Given the API-first approach, a company can easily integrate its headless CMS with other software e.g. automation tools, e-commerce, analytics, language translation services etc.
- Headless CMS is better for performance as content can be served via a content delivery network (CDN). Using the API, content is sent to a CDN where it is cached and saved on all of the CDN’s servers. The page can be statically generated and ready to be served as and when requested by a user — this vastly improves the performance of delivering content around the world.
- Finally, the decoupling of the front end and the back end also means that headless CMS has a smaller threat surface, thus decreasing security risk.
However, headless doesn’t mean no headaches… and here comes Storyblok
As headless CMSs have grown more popular, it has also become apparent that they have issues of their own: the separation of content from its presentation layer means that marketers who were previously used to a WYSIWYG (“What you see is what you get”) editor in WordPress suddenly lost the ability to visualize content changes on the front end. This makes existing headless CMSs unpopular with some content editors, which hinders adoption.
Dominik Angerer and Alexander Feiglstorfer, the two co-founders of Storyblok, experienced this issue first-hand while working at a web development agency serving large enterprises. They tested a wide range of headless CMSs but could not find a solution in the market that would be fit for purpose for both developers and content editors. This inspired them to build the next generation of headless CMS that works for all users — and so Storyblok was born.
Storyblok is changing the game with its combination of visual editing tools and highly customizable content blocks for marketers on top of a modern headless architecture. All content within Storyblok is modularized and organized into components, which corresponds to the way content sits on a website and the way front end web development frameworks (e.g. Vue or React) work.
Developers naturally think in terms of components when building a website, and so do marketers when they structure content — by being built around components, Storyblok creates a bridge between the two.
Compared to other headless CMSs that store content as a flat data structure and display it as a simple list of fields, Storyblok offers a visual editor that enables marketers to edit content with a real-time website preview, including the possibility to click on and re-arrange components through dragging and dropping. This brings significant productivity gains for enterprises as they roll out content — one of the company’s customers, Education First, says: “Development time for a new, global multilingual site is now around 8 weeks. Previously this was 4–6 months. Also, we have reduced the number of “bespoke sites” by more than 70%, combining in-house developed templates and re-usable Storyblok content.”
When we first met Dominik and Alex, we saw an exceptionally strong founder-market fit based on years of combined experience in the web development space. Storyblok’s strong organic traction and customer love is testament to what Dominik and Alex have built — the platform powers 60,000+ projects across 130 countries, and its enterprise customer segment has grown six-fold in 2020. Storyblok is used by large enterprises including Adidas, Pizza Hut, UPC, Greggs and Decathlon, as well as thousands of solo developers.
We are thrilled to partner with the Storyblok team on their mission to build a global CMS market leader, leading their $8.5 million Series A financing. We look forward to helping them drive international expansion through our global Mubadala ecosystem, empowering more brands to better manage their content online.
Fatou Bintou Sagnang and Barbora Winczerova @ Mubadala Ventures
